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Further Reading

Determining which console maker is shifting the most units on a worldwide basis isn't all that hard if you do some analysis of quarterly financial reports. But figuring out how those relative sales break down within specific countries is much more difficult.

Console makers' financial reports often don't give regional breakdowns for hardware sales; when they do, the numbers are usually grouped not by country but by regions like North America, Europe, and Asia (with Australia and/or "Rest of world" broken out separately if you're lucky). While public sales estimates from outfits like Chart-Track and Media Create can help in Japan and the UK, country-by-country console popularity can be hard to gauge for most of the world.

That's why our ears perked up this week when we got some interesting data on national game console usage. It came from a porn site, of all places: YouPorn's Gamers Statistics breakdown (link generally safe for work, but with some naughty words in images). The site delivers a host of server and search statistics derived from visitors who access it using a console's built-in Web browser.

While it's fascinating to learn that porn hunters on Nintendo systems search for "zelda" and "pokemon" much more often than others, it's the regional breakdowns that really got us interested.

First, the obvious disclaimer; YouPorn viewing statistics are not a perfect analogue for console popularity. It's possible (and maybe even likely) that the userbase for one system or another is more or less likely to use their console to surf for porn. And it says nothing about whether they're more likely to use the console for, you know, actual games.

Still, YouPorn statistics seem to bear some resemblance to overall console popularity worldwide. Overall, YouPorn's stats show 51% of visits coming from PlayStation, 39% from Xbox, and 10% from Wii systems. That's decently close to the 50%/29%/20% split for PS4/XB1/Wii U sales in our latest analysis. The Wii's poor showing makes sense when you consider that the Wii's younger demographic may be underrepresented in porn site stats (The statistics also seem to lump together legacy systems with their current generation counterparts, so visits from the limited browsers on the Xbox 360, PS3, and original Wii could throw off current generation numbers).

Enlarge/ This might be as close as we get to a public, country-by-country console sales report.

Even with all that said, YouPorn's country-by-country breakdowns are pretty interesting. PlayStation is the most popular porn-viewing console in the vast majority of countries that YouPorn tracks—not that surprising, given Sony's lead in the current generation console sales race. But the Xbox manages to take a majority of the YouPorn traffic in a few key console markets: the US, UK, and Mexico (plus Sudan, for some reason). According to the site's statistics, those are the first, sixth, and seventh largest markets for console porn viewing, respectively.

The Wii makes its strongest YouPorn stat showings in Asia, where owners in countries like China, Singapore, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, and Iran all generally prefer to use the Wii over other consoles to access the site. We'd wager a combination of high-end electronics import restrictions and the relatively low cost of Nintendo's systems are combining to make the Wii a more significant player in these countries than others, but it's hard to know for sure.

In countries where the PS4 dominates, the scale of that dominance can vary greatly.

Even in big porn-viewing countries where the PS4 is the most popular console, the specific YouPorn traffic breakdowns show a wide variation in the degree to which the PS4 dominates. Sony shows especially strong numbers throughout continental Europe, from a 57/35 percent split over the Xbox in Germany to a whopping 74/20 percent split in Belgium. That gels with recent comments from SCEE President Jim Ryan, who told VG247 that the PS4 has at least 70 percent of the two-console market in every European country, and "frequently greater than 90 percent."

But Microsoft is much more competitive in other big countries, according to YouPorn stats. That's especially true west of the Atlantic, where it edges out the PS4 46 percent to 43 percent in the US and an impressive 56 percent to 26 percent in Mexico. Where the PS4 has an edge in major North and South American markets, it seems to generally be a small one: a 46/44 percent PS4 advantage in Canada, a 50/45 percent advantage in Brazil, and a 49/42 percent advantage in Colombia (Argentina is a massive exception, with an 85/13 percent edge for the PS4).

YouPorn also broke out its console data at the state level in the US, a statistical slicing which we almost never see in official numbers or analyst reports. Here, the Xbox is utterly dominant, winning the relative battle in 40 of 50 states. Playstation takes the edge in some of the most populous states in the country, though, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Florida, plus a good chunk of New England to boot.

Those also happen to be the states with some of the country's biggest urban centers (the PS4 seems to be more popular in the Washington DC-suburban states of Maryland and Virginia, as well). We'd love to see a breakdown by metropolitan area to confirm if Sony is actually relatively stronger on the more densely populated side of the urban/rural divide, but the state breakdowns certainly support that hypothesis.

As a result, if Microsoft and Sony were somehow running for president, and electoral votes were based on how many people used each company's consoles to visit YouPorn, Xbox would win the electoral college 347 to 191 (assuming DC goes to PlayStation like the surrounding states). While that particular presidential race seems somewhat unlikely to actually happen, all the PlayStation-dominant states in YouPorn's data are Democratic-leaning "blue states" or more middle-of-the-road "purple states" like New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida.

Even if YouPorn's data isn't perfect, it provides a good reminder that worldwide sales numbers in the console wars likely obscure some deep country-to-country and state-to-state variations in popularity. Keep that in mind the next time the console makers release a new worldwide sales report or you see developers focusing on different consoles in different parts of the world.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

Many more, actually. Compare the map to a real world map. Central African Republic and Lesotho are white in Africa. As is Western Sahara, Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and, I think, Kenya. And then outside Africa, on the Arabian peninsula, Yemen is missing.

That is just what immediatly struck me. I'm sure several other countries are missing too. But compare the YouPorn map with a real world map, and you'll notice there are whole countries just... Missing. Especially in Africa, but also on other continents. Being close to the sea which is also white coloured doesn't help. But it's still... bad.

How does someone watch adult entertainment on a Wii? It struggles to play Netflix or Youtube with formal applications so I'm not sure how it can possibly handle a video based website with its horribly broken and outdated browser. Also, youp0rn probably isn't safe for work unless you work for a p0rn site. If you don't understand how proxies and security logging works at the enterprise level then maybe you should avoid handing out bogus advice on what's safe and what's not. Seriously.

Bing has for a long time had significantly better image and video searches than Google. In the last year or two Google improved their image search, but still trails Bing. The last time I looked at Google video searches (a year ago?), they were anaemic. Porn fans know full well that Bing is the best search engine.

Sony shows especially strong numbers throughout continental Europe, from a 57/35 percent split over the Xbox in Germany to a whopping 74/20 percent split in Belgium. That gels with recent comments from SCEE President Jim Ryan, who told VG247 that the PS4 has at least 70 percent of the two-console market in every European country, and "frequently greater than 90 percent."

Except, according to YouPorn, it is frequently under 70% (more than it is close or above) and nowhere in Europe does it show 90%. The few places where it is ~70% (or more) don't account for a lot of sales (European countries that sell much, much less than GB).

The doesn't seem to gel with Ryan's comments - but of course his comments were vague and an exaggeration to begin with (and the press are too stupid to look harder so they just parrot).

At any rate, this seems to show a ~19.5mm/~25.5mm split for One/PS4 - I am pretty sure that is a rosier picture for Xbox than most would assume, and I think larger than Ars figures. Not sure if I would call it "decently close" or not.

LOL. I know right, this dude is way off.

It's almost as if SCEE President Jim Ryan wasn't even talking about being the unequivocal leader in streaming pornography for continental Europe when he made those uninformed comments.

Bing has for a long time had significantly better image and video searches than Google. In the last year or two Google improved their image search, but still trails Bing. The last time I looked at Google video searches (a year ago?), they were anaemic. Porn fans know full well that Bing is the best search engine.

Technically it is impossible to access YouPorn with an IP address in China due to the censorship. You must connect the console through VPN or other encrypted tunnels first, most of time by a modified router, and that changed the IP address to a foreign one. So what happened here must be one of the following two scenarios:

1. An error in the IP address allocation table used by youporn's BI team.2. A network engineer working for China telecom plugged a Wii directly into the backbone network, skipping all GFW censorship devices installed by multiple government agents, just to watch porn.

Sony shows especially strong numbers throughout continental Europe, from a 57/35 percent split over the Xbox in Germany to a whopping 74/20 percent split in Belgium. That gels with recent comments from SCEE President Jim Ryan, who told VG247 that the PS4 has at least 70 percent of the two-console market in every European country, and "frequently greater than 90 percent."

Except, according to YouPorn, it is frequently under 70% (more than it is close or above) and nowhere in Europe does it show 90%. The few places where it is ~70% (or more) don't account for a lot of sales (European countries that sell much, much less than GB).

The doesn't seem to gel with Ryan's comments - but of course his comments were vague and an exaggeration to begin with (and the press are too stupid to look harder so they just parrot).

At any rate, this seems to show a ~19.5mm/~25.5mm split for One/PS4 - I am pretty sure that is a rosier picture for Xbox than most would assume, and I think larger than Ars figures. Not sure if I would call it "decently close" or not.

Jim Ryan was talking about the two current-gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) market. These YouPorn stats are for all current- and last-gen consoles, and possibly handhelds as well.